This invention relates to a method for coding and compressing frame-based data. The invention has particular application to the coding and compressing of telemetry data.
In satellite telemetry, it is important for the ground station operator to monitor and record the satellites' telemetry so that it can be later retrieved and analyzed. Although satellite telemetry is typically a very small portion of the data received from a satellite, over time the satellite telemetry may strain the storage facility provided for its retention. There is, therefore, a reason to compress the received satellite telemetry so that it can be stored in less space.
State-of-health telemetry compression methods have been reported (K. Nickels, C. Thacker, J. A. Storer and J. H. Reif, "Satellite data archives algorithm", Data Compression Conference, 1991, p. 447) that achieve ratios from 100:1 to 5000:1, but these methods are not lossless. In some applications, the compression must be lossless and the compression method must be of sufficiently low complexity to be able to run in near real-time.